Dwelling in Possibility

Life in the (Widow) Hood: Re-Set

Three weeks ago I traveled to Florida to see my daughter graduate from college. This entailed navigating an airport, flying on a plane in close proximity to other passengers, staying in a friend’s home, staying in a hotel, going to restaurants to eat (outside), and walking around the downtown area of St. Pete.

In normal times, these are all normal things to do and we wouldn’t give them a second thought. After a year + of a global pandemic, where we were mainly staying inside and away from other people, where the paint job that I had scheduled for mid-March 2020 began and no one got to see my beautiful navy blue accent wall because no one entered my house except me and my children, these are all strange new things to do. Strange and a little unnerving, because we’ve also lost our sense of security about the normal, and small, daily actions and interactions have brought us enormous fear this year.

And yet, once I hit the tarmac in Florida, and entered a state whose motto should be “What Pandemic?”, instead of feeling nervous and sketchy, I opened up and felt free. Of course, entering a restaurant to use the restroom (using a public restroom!) and going into a shop required a mask. But that felt low key and easy. Walking outside, where no one wore a mask there was just a lot of fresh air and sea breeze and people watching to do, I felt like a re-set button had been pushed.

I assumed that when I came back I would resume my skittish Covid ways. But I haven’t. I really feel safer and more ready to resume what once were the normal, daily interactions of life. And for that I am so grateful.

Life in the (Widow) Hood: Graduation

This coming week marks six years since my husband fell ill, and late in the month we will mark his fifth Yahrzeit.

It’s a minute and a lifetime all at once.

I’ve reached a point where I can think about that year without crying … sometimes. It was a year of illness, loss and grief of incalculable amounts. It was a year in which I lost myself in caretaking, and in which my children lost the safety and innocence of childhood. It was a year of love and laughter, of knowing that we had to say all the things before we couldn’t. Sometimes we did well at that, and sometimes we failed. It was a year of guilt that I couldn’t do more, say more, be more for my husband and my children.

In the ensuing years my three children and I have traveled a path both together and apart in which we have each had to find our own ruts in the road and dig in deeply to figure out where we are going next. The one thing we all know is that we always have each other’s backs, no matter how far apart we’ve roamed. Walking through brimstone together does that to you.

This past weekend my daughter, my joy-filled, lovely middle child, graduated from college. As always with momentous events now, there was sadness mixed in with the celebration. Sure enough, without being asked, her two brothers, one in Israel and on in DC, tuned in to the live stream to watch her walk. They were as proud as I was. They had her back.

Life in the (Widow) Hood: Burrowing

I hugged this week. Now that I can, when I meet someone haven’t been able to see or touch for over a year, I hug them like crazy – hold them and don’t let go. As I clutch my victim, I feel a year’s worth of love and touch radiate from bloodstream into theirs, almost a body-meld. It’s as if all the atoms moving between us carry the messages I want to deliver – I’ve missed you, we’ve been through so much this year, now it’s starting to feel better. I’ve been scared and so have you. I want you to know that I’m still here. I love you.

I spent most of the time between January and March in my house. I had a lot of consulting work, and I had a lot of school work. I had blessedly long weekends in which there were no plans, of course, because, pandemic. I couldn’t travel to see my beloved because I was not yet vaccinated and he was in school every day, co-mingling with dozens of young potential germ vectors.

So I nestled in and enjoyed the silence and stillness. Just me and the dog. We went for daily walks, even in the ice and cold, so I never felt imprisoned. The winter sun and its short slant poured into the back of my house in the mornings, and into the front of my house in the afternoons. I followed it throughout the day with my laptop and my books, settling into different spaces as its heat filtered through my window panes. By the end of each truncated day I was curled up on my favorite couch, reading and writing and just being.

I was alone but I wasn’t lonely. I was deeply embedded in the projects I had for my new school program and I was happy to have time to let the stories that I want to tell just steep for a while. I missed the sweet touch of my partner, of being able to roll over in the morning and feel his warmth infuse my body with a sense of wellbeing, but I knew that this was to be the final extended pandemic separation and that there was an end date. That made it not only bearable but tender and sweet, as we whispered and cooed sweet nothings to each other through our texts and spent Sunday afternoons reading chapters of Charlotte’s Web on the phone to each other. I could make a pun about how hearing each other’s voices read the words of a favorite, comforting book wove us together.

And yet, even in Charlotte’s Web there is death and loss and grief. It was a reminder of how it’s right there, at the door, always.

Life in the (Widow) Hood: One Year Later

Anniversaries live in our bones. We have muscle memory that reminds us that they are upon us even if we have neglected to note it on the calendar. I know, for instance, that every year around this time I start to feel a tightness in my chest and a sadness, for it’s the anniversary of my infant son Ari’s birth and death, five days apart from each other. And while I had thought, all those years ago, that the experience would become merely a part of my past, it’s very much a present story, one that colors my life to this day with perhaps even more meaning than I initially understood 23 years ago. For the grief I experienced over those five short days, and for the past 23 years, has taken up residence in my body, welcoming the newer losses as they accrue and alchemizing them into the strength and wisdom I need to keep moving forward.

Grief is a powerful tool. It guts us and it changes us. We try to run from it, tamp it down, ignore it, wash it away with addictive substances, or work, or food, or any number of numbing proposals. But grief doesn’t work that way – it reminds me of the book I used to read to my children when they were little about a bear hunt. The family is off  to find a bear, but around every corner they encounter an obstacle, whether it’s a river, or mud, or something else they need to forge to continue on their hunt. And at the start of each obstacle, they announce “Oh, no, mud! Thick, oozy mud. We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it. Oh no! We have to go through it!”

And that’s the way it is with grief. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. We just have to wade through it.

Just about one year ago, our lives were overtaken by a global pandemic. We were shut down, almost overnight. Locked in, suddenly we couldn’t leave our homes, we were facing shortages of the most basic things, like toilet paper, and those who were lucky enough to have the access  had to learn to shift everything about our lives online. People started dying in horrific numbers, and we had no idea where the disease lay, or how we might contract it. Everything looked like a sinister disease-carrier, from the handrail on the metro to the gas pump to the grocery store door handle. We were told not to wear masks, as essential workers needed them, but soon learned that masks were in fact our best defense against the deadly pathogen. Confusing messages, disinformation and chaotic news assaulted our senses on an hourly basis. We could no longer see our families or friends, let alone touch them. Everything we knew to be true was no longer so. And we had no sense of when this new upside down, dystopic life might shift back to something we recognized as normal.

Each of us has a different date coming up in March that marks the year since we had that moment, realizing that our life had just changed at the snap of a finger. Mine is March 11 – I had lunch with a colleague who is also a friend, who laughed when we hugged hello and told me that she had friends who were already choosing not to go out to lunch. As we sat at the table, I started to wonder if it was safe to touch the menu, the napkin, the food. I went home and didn’t leave my house again, except to walk the dog, for a long time.

Life in the (Widow) Hood: Pandemic Flashback

There has been a spate of articles, most recently an 18-page section in today’s Sunday New York Times, about the impact the pandemic has had on mothers in the U.S. Over four million jobs held by women lost since March. A 700% increase in calls to the crisis hotline for working parents at the Center for WorkLife Law. Women are working at the kitchen table while overseeing zoom school; they are also working in the closet, stealing a few quiet moments in the stairwell, and juggling screaming children, nursing babies, feelings of anxiety, depression, overwhelming loss and inadequacy to the task. There is a lack of child care, closed schools, no grandparents available to help because of Covid. Lost wages, lost time, lost senses of self, lost everything.

And while I have worried about my friends with young children, trapped a maelstrom not of their making with no clear end in sight, I have also been breathing tiny sighs of relief that my children are older and that their pandemic needs are different. Their mental health has been my biggest worry, and while that is a big worry, it is not a 24/7 occupation.

But I’m also completely triggered by these stories, because the tale of a working mother during the pandemic mirrors my own experience as a caregiver just five short years ago.

It took me a long time to recognize that my husband’s illness and death were not the only pieces of the grief puzzle I needed to process and learn to incorporate into my life moving forward. Perhaps even larger was the trauma of my year of being his caregiver – a non-stop 54 weeks during which time I was responsible for every move he made and every need he had, while also managing my three children’s fear and sadness and school and life events, maintaining our house, dealing with all the emotional labor of a family and also being tossed into the role, overnight, of becoming the sole wage-earner and continuing to work at my full-time job.

My husband was physically incapacitated from the beginning of his illness; a mangled shoulder, caused by his first seizure, not only created a huge diversion from the tumor rapidly growing in his brain but also set off a cascade of physical ailments that required a wheelchair from the moment he left the hospital, as well as two surgeries, six months of rehab and physical therapy and a stubborn patient’s fixation on healing the part of his body over which he had some control. He spent the first six months of his final year in a state of believing that if he could only conquer the shoulder everything would be ok.

For the first month, when he was still in the hospital, I was on sentry duty for 15-hour days as I needed to be his case worker. I was interlocutor between the various doctors – none of whom talked to each other – gatekeeper to phone calls and visitors, decision maker, surgery scheduler and comforter-in-chief to everyone around me.

Once he came home, the burden exploded. I procured and dosed all his medications, scheduled and took him to six weeks of daily radiation therapy, got him to PT, scheduled conference calls with doctors, dealt with all the paperwork involved with social security and his job and healthcare, got him up every morning, helped him shower and get dressed and come downstairs, make many meals a day to manage his steroid-induced appetite, was on call through every night to help him get to the bathroom, took him to doctor’s appointments and managed each new challenge, including the onset of diabetes where I had to prick his tender skin every day, blood clots that almost killed him, sleep issues where we had to go to a sleep center overnight in the hospital, and on top of everything else attend to his anxiety, his depression, his sadness and his fear. By the end, I had to work with hospice, get the hospital bed installed, pick out his funeral plot and be the one who would gradually increase the morphine dosage, at his request, to help nature accelerate its course.

Life in the (Widow) Hood: Breaking the Glass

“Why aren’t you also worried about the person in that ambulance and what’s happened to them?” my oldest son, now a young adult, asked as an ambulance roared past. We were driving to the cemetery where he was to be a pallbearer for one of his oldest friends -- the first of his now-two friends to take their own lives in the middle of the pandemic, within two months of each other.

I contemplated my answer. My son is both thoughtful and obstructionist. He is often looking for an argument, or to play devil’s advocate. When he was young, it was righteous indignation around the fact that he had to wear a coat to walk to school, or why optional homework assignments should be completed. Today, with his clever mind and arcane knowledge on a range of topics, it’s about the pleasure of and interest in debate for its own sake.

“Because I don’t know them, I don’t know the circumstances of why the ambulance is needed right now, and because my heart is already full with the loss of someone we know and love today” I replied, not quite satisfied with my answer. Neither was he.

He pushed on. “But what about the 250,000 people who have died of Covid? Why aren’t you mourning them as well? Isn’t there a societal…” He paused for the right concept. “A societal mandate to think about our fellow citizens? What about the six million?”

Ah. Hebrew school had reached him after all.  

“It’s too big a number for a human to grasp,” I said. “The human brain is designed to focus on the individual. The collective is a more metaphysical conundrum.”

But it still didn’t ring true. It didn’t ring true three months ago, even when we couldn’t believe that we had passed the 250,000 mark. It was too big a number. It was too much to process. Today, as we count down the hours to the new administration and simultaneously reach 400,000 dead, my numbness continues to grow. But now it’s also different. Now I have people who have been personally affected by Covid, who have lost someone they love. I continue to fear that it’s right around the corner for me as well, waiting to take me or someone in my close orbit. That danger feels real and present.

Life in the (Widow) Hood: Bearing Witness, Bearing Pain

I waited on a line early yesterday morning on a quest to get some bagels. As I neared the store entrance, I could hear the sounds of the music from inside, and the opening notes to an old Billy Joel song, “Only the Good Die Young.” And I started to cry, as I had been doing pretty much all weekend.

When I first met my husband many years ago, one of the first life stories he shared with me was that one of his close boyhood friends had died in a terrible car accident when he was in his early 20s. My husband could not listen to “Only the Good Die Young” without invoking his friend's name and memory. This early death had a profound effect on my husband, who always lived his life as fully as he could, knowing that it could be wiped out in an instant. And of course, we know the ending to that story, as my husband, too, died too young.

My 25-year-old son was a pallbearer this weekend at the funeral of one of his closest childhood friends. His friend had died suddenly, which we know today means that the pain of life caught up with him and he was unable to figure out how to outrun it. Watching the many friends, young men who I’ve known since they were little boys, bravely carry their friend to his final resting place split my heart open into a million pieces. Watching his parents grieve as they said goodbye split it a million times more.

Life in the (Widow) Hood: Duality

For my high school yearbook, when the requisite senior quotes were being collected to garnish the inevitably ugly thumbnail portrait, I spent a long time finding the most appropriate words with which to cement myself in my classmates’ minds for all eternity. I landed on Whitman, his Song of Myself speaking to my vision of myself as an island, living on a different plane than my peers: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Not surprisingly, decades later, in our Pinterest-fueled society, this same poem has become memorialized as a meme, and you can order a poster with its words in a million different fonts. Because it’s true. We are all large, we all contain multitudes. Back in 1980 I thought I was being lofty and literary; in fact, I was just ahead of the marketing curve.

But something about the poem sticks with me, in these days of collective grief and the ongoing internal conversation I have with myself about whether anything is worthwhile anymore. Four years into widowhood, I am caught between two worlds – the world I knew, that I created and nurtured with my husband and our children, the world that included a house and a career and friends and a vision for our family and the future together … and the apocalyptic world I inhabit now, that revolves around grief and loss and the ground shifting under my feet every day and a new love and partner who lives far away and has no relationship to any of the before and who sits and waits for me in another house, in another city, where we cultivate our own private version of a new future that propels me forward but doesn’t exist in the real time residue of my former universe.

Life in the (Widow) Hood: The Wrong Side of the Bed

Many years ago, when my husband and I reconstructed our tiny bungalow and turned it into a large, four-bedroom home for our large, five-person family, we indulged in a king-sized bed. Prior to the build, our two younger children, 5 and 3 at the time, liked to pile into our queen bed in the morning, which was just a little too snuggly for all four of us. So we thought the bigger bed would make for a happier family romping place. Little did we know that by the time we moved back into our house the morning bed routine would become a relic of the past.

Never the less, we loved our large bed. We bought a gorgeous Cherrywood headboard and indulged in the space. And when my husband got sick, he took over the entire bed for the year and I slept in our old bed down the hall in what had become the guest room. His pillows and wedges and medications all needed to be close by, and he didn’t want anyone or anything touching him. As the year wore on, the indentation on his side of the bed deepened.

I woke him each morning, helped him rise from that bed, helped him get dressed on that bed. I helped him don his compression hose on that bed, tugging and pulling until I was worn out. I put him to bed each night, adjusting the wedge pillow so that it sat exactly where he wanted it to lift his legs so as to prevent blood clots. When he became diabetic I measured his blood sugar on that bed, and I kissed the top of his head each night on that bed. Once he came home from the hospital with his terminal diagnosis, we never again spent leisure time together on the bed; it was all about duty and tasks and preparing for the end of life.  

Life in the (Widow) Hood: Lipstick

I just did a very daring thing for these Covid times: I ordered a new lipstick.

Of course, the only people who are going to see me wearing it will be seeing it through the filter of a Zoom screen. I don’t really want to start figuring out the best way to remove lipstick stains from masks.

But that’s ok. I see it as another nod to optimism, the most recent being my application and acceptance to an MFA graduate program in writing. If I can’t put on real clothes and walk the streets and ride the subway and eat alone in restaurants, searching for dialogue and copy and inspiration, at least I can wear a bright red lipstick on my next Zoom call.

I only really discovered lipstick a few years ago. As my face started to age, looking a little more wan with the wear and tear of a quarter century of child rearing, working full-time, caring for a sick and dying spouse, and the rapid declension of the world around us, I realized that I could brighten it up with a little color. Not the bright blue creme eyeshadow of my Teen Magazine junior high youth, but a subtle, warm, brownish red to make my lips pop and my green eyes blaze. I may not be a Loreal cover girl, but it definitely perked things up.

And then, Covid struck. First, no going out anywhere where anyone could see you, so we began a rapid descent into yoga pants and t shirts all day, every day. Then masks became de rigueur, at least in my blue bubble part of the world, so makeup was no longer viable. At this point in the pandemic, I’m lucky if I don a pair of closed-toes shoes. My heels must think I’ve died.

But this morning, reading the Sunday New York Times on the porch in the blessedly cooled-down morning air, I glanced at a listicle column about Suzanne Vega, heartache diva of the 90s. She’s about to release a recording from her gig in the Before Times at the renowned Café Carlyle, which, as the description notes, retains its reputation as a stronghold of old New York City grandeur. In her list of 10 inspirations, number eight popped out at me: Revlon's “Cherries In the Snow.” It’s her go-to lipstick, and she wears it for Zoom meetings and galas alike.